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Thursday, January 15, 2009

Robert Imbriale, Direct Marketing Guru, Fortells the Future of the Internet

The Next Big Thing Online

By Robert ImbrialeBusiness Success Coach

When I first landed on the World Wide Web early in 1992, one ofthe biggest claims I’d hear again and again about this dynamicnew medium is that it would soon be able to transmit graphics,then photos, then sound, and finally even video would be able totravel from computer to computer without the need for atelevision.

While these were great promises, the truth took a bit longer tomaterialize. Over the years we’ve seen many innovations on theInternet, including voice and video conferencing. The questionthat is on the minds of many business owners is where do we gofrom here? What’s next?

We’ve now got audio, radio, telephone, and video on the Internet,what’s left to tackle? Don’t worry, we’ve got a long way to goand what you’ve seen so far really is just the very crudebeginnings of what’s still to come.

How you figure out what’s coming next is to look at the evolutionof the Internet to date. There is a pattern of evolution that’sworth looking at. Let’s take streaming radio broadcasts forexample. If you remember when these broadcasts started to appearon the Internet in the late 1990’s they all sounded as if theywere being broadcast through a pair of tin cans with a piece ofrope between them.

While the innovation was amazing, it took several years before itwas fine-tuned and really ready for the masses. Today, when youtune into a radio broadcast, it’s almost as good as being in thestudio listening in person.

This is what you now see happening with video on the Internet.First, it was really amazing to have a tiny, tiny window open upto play a very low quality video clip on your computer. The firsttime I saw this in a mass distribution was with Windows 95(TM).

On the installation CD, there were a few video clips that wouldplay with Windows Media Player right on your computer. In thosedays, I’d show that video to everybody I ran into that wasrunning Windows 95(TM) because I thought it was just so cool!

From there, we began to see small, short video clips appear onthe Internet, but they were very flaky, often failed to download,and you usually needed some media player to view them.

Nearly a decade later, we have YouTube.com and now just abouteverybody can watch video on their computers. While this isreally great, there are still many improvements in the works andthis is where you’ll see the biggest innovations to come in thenext few years.

First, there’s the Internet connections offered by the ISP’s.These are now undergoing some major changes and you’ll soon seeInternet connections reaching or exceeding 100 Megabits. That’smore than 10 times most current broadband connection speeds.

As these connections become more and more available, video willcontinue to evolve from the fuzzy, often choppy small video clipswe’re used to seeing on YouTube.com to full screen High-Definition quality video being streamed in real-time to yourcomputer.

As this happens, there will be innovation in the quality of videopeople produce and upload to the Internet. For businesses, thatwill mean no more sticking a $50 web cam in your face andrecording a low-quality video with poor lighting, and sound thatechoes off every wall in the room.

Viewers will simply stop watching as they will have the choice ofseeing many more high-quality videos from hundreds of thousandsof sources.

This change will stimulate the creation of even more videoediting products, and cameras that continue to deliver higher andhigher quality video at lower and lower prices.

Video is not the only area of innovation to keep your eyes oneither. The other major area is voice over IP, or VOIP. Thisemerging technology is just now becoming good enough to be aserious contender in the telecom industry.

In the coming years as Internet connections speed up ten-fold,you’ll see VOIP offer better and better quality, and in manycases it will surpass the quality of the POTS (Plain OldTelephone) lines we use today.

When that happens, look for telecommuting to grow exponentiallybecause a company can then run a telephone system that canconnect to any phone in the world from a single location.

While many of these systems are in place now, but their poorvoice quality has kept many businesses away from VOIP. That willsoon change as sound quality improves and it will sparkanother round of outsourcing like we’ve never seen before.

Finally, the other big trend to pay close attention to isportable computing. We now have many cell phones and hand-heldcomputers that can surf the Internet, but in many ways, they arestill rather crude. Look for this to change rapidly in the comingyears as better, bigger, foldable screens become available andwireless Internet connections become faster and faster.

With social networking on the rise, and better than 90%penetration in the US for households with Internet access,innovation will continue to evolve at its normal break-neck pacefor the foreseeable future.

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About the Author

Robert Imbriale is the author of the best-selling book,Motivational Marketing. He is a successful business coach, andseminar leader who has helped hundreds of thousands of businessowners create bigger, more successful businesses, and he can helpyou too. Tell him what your biggest challenge is with yourbusiness right now! Go to www.AskRobertImbriale.com If you wouldlike to have Robert help you with your business, you can reachhim at 1-800-541-3816 or at www.RobertImbriale.com

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